Arts & Culture | Film

As the great American journalist I.F. Stone once said, “All governments lie,” and they never lie more freely than when they are conducting the business of spying. For all the professions of national, professional and tribal loyalties that are earnestly voiced throughout Nadav Schirman’s documentary film “The Green Prince,” which opens Sept. 12, it is ultimately personal loyalty that governs the behavior of its protagonists. That outcome feels entirely appropriate in a film about the hallucinatory world of counter-intelligence, double agents, lies and betrayals that Mosab Hassan Yousef and Gonen Ben Yitzhak inhabit. When everyone around you is a professional liar, you have to trust the person who tells you the truth, however reluctantly.

The end of the First World War brought about the dismantling of both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires as well as the peace settlement that made possible both the rise of the Nazis and the chaotic creation of the modern Middle East. With the rather ironic conjunction of the latest outbreaks of violence in the Middle East and the centenary of the First World War, it is impossible not to note that two vastly different films about the Shoah and its aftermath are opening on Aug. 29 at the same multiplex. Each film came from one of the First World War’s biggest losers. A drama released in its home country in 2013, “Le Grand Cahier (The Notebook),” directed by János Szász from the novel by Agota Kristof, was made in Hungary; the new documentary “Shadows from My Past” is the work of Gita Kaufman, an Austrian Jew who escaped the Nazis as a child, and her husband and co-director Curt Kaufman, and focuses specifically on the Jewish-Austrian experience.

If there is a more unlikely purveyor of Kabbalah than Steven Bram it’s hard to imagine who it might be. Bram, the producer, co-director, narrator and protagonist of the new film “Kabbalah Me,” which opens on Aug. 22, is a producer of sports films, a Jets and Rangers fan and a secular Jew who was raised in the classical Reform tradition. But when he approached his 50th birthday, he began to wonder about “the spiritual secrets of the universe.” He asked himself, “What am I doing here?” and realized that he didn’t have an answer.

Samuel Fuller held the distinction of being the only Hollywood filmmaker/GI who participated in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II. Already in his early 30s, Fuller (whose family name was changed from Rabinowitz before he was born) had logged several screenwriting credits before he volunteered in the wake of Pearl Harbor; his mother would send him a 16mm movie camera while he was overseas with the 1st U.S. Infantry, and with it he shot footage of his buddies, of the brutal combat he endured over the course of four years and, inevitably, of the camp at Falkenau.

With his latest film, “The Last Sentence,” which opens on June 20, the Swedish director Jan Troell revisits the world of his 1994 film “Hamsun,” again focusing on the reaction of the Scandinavian countries to the rise of Nazism in Germany. In a sense, one could say that “The Last Sentence” is the earlier film stood on its head: another biopic centering on a famous writer and the tensions within his personal and political lives. The difference is that Torgny Segerstedt, the protagonist of the new film, was as dedicated an anti-Fascist as Knut Hamsun was a supporter of Hitler. Otherwise, the films are strikingly similar in ways that are not altogether helpful.